In these scenarios, John is struggling with an inner balance. In a spiritual journey, all aspects within us must be aligned to the greater purpose, or else we will end up fighting ourselves and derailing our progress. One aspect of us may embrace change, while another aspect may resist it. Which side wins? In a sense, neither side is in the right alignment until both aspects are aligned together. Then it is a matter of listening to inner guidance rather than thinking “we” know what’s next. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

John:So in my dream, the first one during the meditation dream is, I’m carrying the belief that things are going to be breaking down little by little. But as I observe this energy, which is flowing through the breath from within myself, I do not see the rhythm occurring.

In other words, now all of a sudden something isn’t breaking down. I’m expecting it to be breaking down, almost as if I have adapted the conceptualization, and yet in my meditation dream it quit breaking down. And I’m so surprised by this condition that I’m waiting for the cadence to change.

It’s almost like there’s some mistake. I have to let this dream develop more because it will break down. And finally I realize that something has shifted and I need to act abruptly to note that this change has happened. In other words, I can’t keep holding on to what I had been expecting to take place in a particular way.

And then in the meditation dream comes this other one, too, and I’m in another part of the place I live, and in this other place where I live I tune in on what I hear is going on. And one of the things I hear is a person who is moderating the activities and lives, and like one of the octaves in life is that this person is noting, is something has changed and that they’ve got a “buy” signal on gold.

In other words, that gold’s going to go up as an aspect in life. Because I see things breaking down from the previous, but then am told that maybe that has stopped for some reason and, yeah, maybe gold could go up. So I contemplate if I should wait until later in the morning to act because the market is just now opening up and maybe I should give it some time to unfold.

And then suddenly I get the impulse in me that if I do that I will lose most of the gain. So I grab the phone to place the trade. I’m unable to call out because a woman, in another part of my place, has the line tied up. In other words, when I pick up the phone she’s on the line inside the house, too.

And she seems to need to play out the drama of making a scene, blocking me from doing what I need to do. And no matter what I do, she keeps acting dicey about this. She seems to be having fun keeping me bottled up and frustrated. I can’t seem to get her to knock it off and just let me make a quick call.

So I get furious, and I have no choice but to go charging over to where she’s at. I’m going to throw her out of the place. And I wake up as I am furious inside, reeling from where I am at in my place to where she is at to have it out. I cannot have someone who is purposefully trying to mess me up just because she can do it for no reason other than she likes to see me sabotaged. I am furious that I would have someone like that in my place.

The meaning of this is, I am gauging the alchemical unfoldment from within myself. I am settled back watching, waiting. Suddenly I sense a shift I need to follow. I’m unable to do this because I have this other part of myself that is purposely content remaining in a trance; different perception or something, different way of looking at it.

I had been waiting patiently for some clarity to come through and, when it did, there is this trance-like nature that won’t let go of its trance that it is in. The part of myself that feels it needs to be instantly responsive to a change in the inner flow, and act accordingly in the outer, becomes incensed and furious when this is impossible.

But this is not going to make much difference. The damage has already been done. In other words, I had to act in the moment and didn’t. All I can do is draw this part out because I cannot settle for being unable to act with conviction when the moment is right.

So, what is going on on a deeper level? I am noticing that I carry a trait within that seems to believe that I am not entitled to take the kind of spontaneous action I determine to be important. That such action is too abrupt, and to stop this sort of thing from continuing to shock the system I am being stopped and forced to confront this waywardness that just won’t let go.

But there’s the deeper effect. Because I carry this part of myself that has preset ideas on how things need to be that when I do not get my way because the flow turns out to be other than what I had been gauging, my struggling within, that goes back and forth, has set up and established a part of myself that is unable to function in accordance with the need.

This is something I cannot accept. I must be responsive to the perceived need at the precise moment something has shifted. Another part of me is saying, no, settle back, and take your good old time because you are not meant to be in control. This part of myself loves hanging out in a trance-like condition, as if that is just fine. I can’t stand such a poison controlling my natural nature like this and act abruptly to free myself up.

And so then I get to looking at this more, and I look at this as a price I am paying that is outrageous. In other words, that’s the schematic now. I need to look at my sense of balance more closely because I am being abrupt with myself. If my perceived need of being instantly spontaneous is fomenting this reaction, I am missing something.

If being like this is going to be disruptive to my need to be more at ease, then whatever it is that I also need to be paying attention to that is important for some reason, that I am not properly comprehending, I’m not noting that.

To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: A Waywardness

Last night I was struggling because I noticed that my painful shoulder issue is related to the fact that I’m not shifting to an inner flow for the solution. There’s something on the other side that I’m not catching up with.

As a consequence, my attention to the reflection in the outer causes the shoulder imbalance. There’s a kind of peculiar mannerism in me that still holds on to that, and I’m not aware of exactly what it is.

Essentially, I could understand it if there really still was some outer approach that I needed to recognize, but I don’t think there is. Yet, with the inner trying to come through in some way, and the outer struggling to keep hold, it tears me up inside.

I notice this at night. One of the reasons I can sometimes sleep with the pain is because, deep down inside, I know that this is something that I can’t solve in an outer way, I have to solve it in an inner way. But, depending on what level of sleep I’m in, I also believe that there’s something else that I should be doing in the outer.

So there’s a contradiction, or struggle. In other words, I don’t shift into the whole like I might. This causes me to realize that I can’t keep trying to fight things, thinking that approach will work. It’s hard on my inner sensibilities when I don’t adhere to them, and that causes the physical body to have to go through a lot of anguish.

Basically, what I’m talking about is when a person chooses to set something aside, or suppress it, as opposed to dealing with it. Let’s say it’s a trauma, and it affects the body. It can cause the body to break down, or you can get blindsided in some more subtle way that could become very serious.

It shows the nature of how the inner works, and how the outer is just a reflection of that. I’ve got to be careful if I’m going to go on (outer) tangents, when I should know better in terms of the inner. The body gets beat up because, through development, the body is actually getting more sensitized, which means that my sensitization is based upon getting closer and closer to an interconnectivity. So I feel the imbalance and this is like a friction that tears away at my wellbeing – on a physical level.

If I don’t notice this contradiction, then the body can stay unconscious. But, if I start to notice the imbalances, they tear at me. That’s why getting more conscious or sensitive is actually harder on the body, because I feel that movement inside and that movement inside has to be handled, or grounded. When we become more sensitive, even what we eat is different in order to try to appeal to the subtler aspects that are afoot.

Eating like I did yesterday, ribs and a greasy pulled-pork sandwich, was taxing to the system. But what really made it taxing was I added all the popcorn to it, which is another thing that can create heartburn, and the combination set off something inside that was very painful most of the night, like something deep in the esophagus. I was getting up and eating applesauce and everything else, but I wasn’t really able to soothe it very well.

So, between the heartburn and the fact that I had no inner solution for my shoulder, i.e., still debating whether something more can be done in the outer rather than shifting it from within, I was going back and forth and in a lot of physical pain.

But it’s kind of like our friend’s example, when he says his blood pressure is down because he’s no longer taking things so seriously. And there’s truth in that.

We wreak such havoc on ourselves. I mean, sometimes I’m able to go somewhere within, to a level that knows the shoulder is part of the inner process, and I’m able to coexist with it. But when I don’t, and I still relate to something in the outer, then the shoulder pain does a number on me.

Of course, the degree I buy into an outer solution as a way of looking at any issue, is the degree to which I dull my consciousness and end up fighting against the reflection, as if that’s real. This approach with the outer is preventing me from letting go on the inner.

So I struggle, and in struggling I remain confused. I can know that everything in life works from the inner to the outer, but to truly live that is a natural knowingness that comes from this inner state of the higher self.

It’s not yet possible for me, so I tear myself down physically by over identifying with how I am, in everything, while I don’t quite acknowledge the inner presence. This contradiction just feeds the inner struggle.

John: In Jeane’s dream yesterday (see The Support of the Whole), the image showed that part of her had made a connection to the overall, while a part of her still had hesitations about that aspect of letting go.

When we see ourselves as part of the whole, it means that the events in the outer no longer have a certain type of validity; they no longer dictate how we respond in ourselves. It means we have a way of seeing and understanding everything that’s happening around us that’s less personal and more universal.

When we view the world from a separated, personalized viewpoint, it’s like we take some aspect of life and we dwell upon it and dwell upon it until it becomes our anguish, our pain, our heartache that we’re going through. It becomes a big drama.

But, in a spiritual development, once we get through, or let go, of the personalized drama, then our attention can shift to everything else, and we can view events in life as part of the natural dynamic. We no longer see ourselves as separate, but part of an unfolding process.

Until that point, we’ll still be coloring, or adding personal bias, to whatever we perceive around us. We’ll still be coloring it with some aspect of our drama and, therefore, keeping everything separate because we’ll be sorting it out in relationship to this non-empty state that we still choose to carry. So everything will still be evaluated, or filtered, in relationship to that.

You might say your dream has asked you the question: can you go off and be okay without having a particular, defined presence, functioning as if to reflect things to you as a mirror? Can you now do this for yourself – in relationship to everything in life? A part of you says yes (you’re moving) and a part of you still says no in the dream, and that’s the part where this guy comes in and starts going through the closet.

So that’s the neurosis. I mean, you’re still not quite fully believing it and so you’re still having to go and sift through the evaluation forms in the corner, as if there’s still some sort of reality in its own separate, distinct way.

See, in an emptiness, in a state in which you lose yourself, there’s no evaluation left. I mean, there’s only an evaluation left when there’s the idea that things are separate and distinct, i.e., you have to look at something over here, and then you have to look at something over there, and there’s a distinction. But you only see these distinctions when you’re looking at reflections of the truth, not the real truth, because reflections take something out of the flow of what is real and they suspend it out.

As a reflection is suspended out, it’s almost like a motion picture on a screen. It’s set and fixed. Then, if you relate to the image that’s set as if it’s real, and that’s how you approach and react to things, then you have to evaluate that setness. There’s no aliveness in that.

If you go back to when the image was first created, all the aliveness exists there and it’s fluid and it changes and it correlates and it relates and it includes and intertwines, but the projection itself doesn’t do that. The outer world we see and experience is such a projection.

So if some part of you is coming into the office and grabbing forms for evaluative purposes, that’s the set quality trait that’s still there: some aspect of you is still taking the reflection as literal. So you have to contend with that aspect in you – there’s still work to be done.

The key to this dream is that you have two energetics going on, and you have to try to feel the both of them. You have to feel the energetic that has the bravado that’s able to recognize that it does have this independence and freedom and linkage and connection upon which it can fall back and be okay.

And then you have to feel the part that still has to knee-jerk and go through a reaction in some sense, and then has to evaluate where and how all of this is and what it’s all about. That part is the part that’s still working with the outer reflection, as opposed to an inner essence.